Richard Hamilton
Table with Ashtray, 2002
Slate, oak, brass and glass, 51 3/16 × 23 ⅝ × 13 inches (130 × 60 × 33 cm)
Richard Hamilton was born in 1922 in London. He died in 2011.
Studied at the Royal Academy Schools and Slade School of Fine Art. Taught at King’s College, University of Durham, from 1953 to 1966. In the 1950s Hamilton devised the exhibitions Growth and Form and Man, Machine & Motion for the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. He collaborated on This Is Tomorrow, for which he produced his seminal image Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? (1956). Throughout his career Hamilton has exhibited internationally. Major retrospective exhibitions have been organized by the Tate Gallery, London, 1970 and 1992; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1973; Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona and Museum Ludwig, Cologne, 2003.
A few of the many solo shows to have been held since his first exhibition of paintings at the Hanover Gallery, London, 1955, are: Nationalgalerie, Berlin, 1974; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 1976; Kunsthalle Bielefeld, 1978; Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, 1988; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 1989; Kunstmuseum Winterthur, 1990 and 2002; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1996; and the British Museum, London, 2002.
Some of the group exhibitions Hamilton has participated in include: Documenta 4, Kassel, 1968; São Paulo Bienal, 1989; Documenta X, Kassel 1997; and Shanghai Biennale, 2006.
Hamilton has been awarded the William and Noma Copley Foundation Award, 1960; the John Moores Contemporary Painting Prize, 1960; the Talens Prize International, 1970; the Leone d’Oro for his exhibition in the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, 1993; the Arnold Bode Prize at Documenta X, Kassel, 1997; and the Max Beckmann Prize for painting, 2006. He was made Companion of Honour in 1999.
Hamilton’s A Host of Angels was exhibited in the Palazzetto Tito, as a contribution of Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa to the Venice Biennale, 2007.
An extended version Pixelated Angels in Virtual Spaces opened at the Kunsthalle Bielefeld in May 2008.
In 2010, the Serpentine Gallery presented Hamilton’s Modern Moral Matters, an exhibition focusing on his political and protest works which were shown previously in 2008 at Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh.
A retrospective by Hamilton and Rita Donagh Civil Rights etc was on view at the Dublin City Gallery, the Hugh Lane in 2012. The exhibition included works from the 1960s to this decade that primarily relate to Ireland, but also to seminal moments of social change in recent history.
A major Richard Hamilton retrospective exhibition opened in the winter of 2014 at Tate Modern, London, and traveled to the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid.
The Summer 2026 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Ellen Gallagher’s Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish (2026) on the cover.
In this video, Jenny Saville sits down inside her first major exhibition in Venice to discuss how the great Venetian artists of the past and the city’s heritage influence her work. The show brings together more than thirty canvases and works on paper from the 1990s to the present, tracing the development of her practice, which is deeply rooted in the history of painting.
Francis Bacon lived and worked in Paris for a decade starting in the mid-1970s. The city and the art he encountered there provided a profound backdrop for his austere late style, which often brings together smooth, colorful backgrounds, spare architectural signifiers, and sculptural human forms. Here, three striking paintings from that period are considered by Sebastian Smee.
An exhibition at Gagosian, Hong Kong, brings together three of James Turrell’s Glasswork pieces along with site plans, photographs, and models of his Skyspaces and Roden Crater. Here, Alice Godwin explores the history of the Glassworks and their relationship to the artist’s wider practice.
Janne Sirén considers Anselm Kiefer’s new paintings, the subject of an exhibition at Gagosian, New York, entitled Seal My Ears Shut and I Shall Hear You Still.
On April 16, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, opened the first midcareer survey of Derrick Adams’s multidisciplinary practice. Covering over twenty years of work, the exhibition, titled View Master, brings together the artist’s painting, sculpture, collage, performance, and video, as well as a vibrant new commission created for the museum’s façade. Ahead of the opening, Adams met with Tessa Bachi Haas, cocurator of the survey, to discuss his formative experiences with television, the impact of his work in arts education on his practice, and the importance of taking a more complex, more joyful, and more expansive approach to Black American life and culture.
Adam D. Weinberg has been working with Giuseppe Penone on an exhibition of the artist’s new sculptures, The Reflection of Bronze, that opens at Gagosian, New York, on April 22. The works explore the character and possibilities of bronze. Here, Weinberg considers Penone’s enduring engagement with the alloy and addresses the conceptual underpinnings of the exhibition’s three-room structure.
On March 28, a major exhibition of Jenny Saville’s work opened at Ca’ Pesaro–Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna in Venice, bringing together nearly thirty paintings from the 1990s to the present. The exhibition is curated by Elisabetta Barisoni, head of the museums division at Venice’s Ca’ Pesaro, Museo Fortuny, and head of MUVE in Mestre. Saville’s monumental canvases are set in dialogue with the great Venetian artists of the past, creating a unique encounter between contemporary painting and the city’s artistic heritage. Here, the artist speaks with Stefania Ventra, professor with Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, about her early trips to Venice, the radicality of Titian’s painting, and depicting emotional truth.
Jeff Koons tells Alison McDonald about his appreciation for the pioneering artist and thinker Marcel Duchamp.
From their respective fields, three international cultural figures—artist and designer Ronan Bouroullec, fashion visionary Michèle Lamy, and chef and restaurateur Enrique Olvera—reflect on Donald Judd’s work in furniture, the subject of recent exhibitions in South Korea and Japan.
Laura Bruni writes about a major exhibition celebrating the work of the British sculptor Henry Moore at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, London.
The most recent edition of Picture Books, an imprint organized by Emma Cline and Gagosian, pairs Mary Gaitskill’s novella STAUF: A Tragedy with Jill Mulleady’s painting The Shift. In celebration of this forthcoming publication, Gaitskill and Mulleady discuss the myth of Faust, good and evil in the digital age, and the channeling of raw matter into art.
